In the final days of Joe Biden’s administration, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit alleging PepsiCo violated the Robinson-Patman Act. This largely dormant New Deal-era antitrust law prohibits wholesalers from giving large retailers preferential prices disproportionate to sales volume. Donald Trump’s second administration dropped the case soon after taking office, but a watchdog group, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, petitioned the Southern District of New York court to unseal the Biden-era complaint in late 2025, and the court did. The details that emerged were explosive. Drawing on a trove of internal PepsiCo emails and other documents, Biden’s FTC accused the company of forging a secret pact with Walmart to ensure the big-box giant had unbeatable retail prices on PepsiCo products. PepsiCo allegedly did this by monitoring retail prices for its products and raising wholesale prices on retailers whose PepsiCo prices were too close to Walmart’s.
As the Monthly reported in January, the alleged conduct carried profound implications for food pricing and affordability. Conventional wisdom holds that Walmart’s low prices reflect volume discounts and economies of scale used by the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer—America’s largest employer and largest grocery retailer by sales. But the PepsiCo suit, brought by the FTC under its then-Chair Lina Khan, presented evidence of the opposite of efficiency: PepsiCo’s painstaking micromanagement of prices to protect its most powerful buyer. For consumers, this raises the possibility that Walmart’s market power does not, at least in this case, discipline prices downward, but inflates them across the market. (Since the Trump administration dropped the suit, PepsiCo did not get to make its case in court, although it said in a statement at the time that it “has always and will continue to provide all customers with fair, competitive, and non-discriminatory pricing, discounts and promotional value.”)
But before the FTC suit regarding PepsiCo was filed in January 2025, private plaintiff antitrust suits against Walmart and battery maker Energizer had already been underway for two years. These cases, which have received scant media attention, provide another set of allegations that Walmart may be influencing its suppliers’ pricing decisions in ways that harm consumers.
Reached for comment, Walmart and Energizer did not respond.
The plaintiffs in these suits, which include both smaller retailers and consumers, allege that Walmart pressured Energizer to monitor sellers’ prices to ensure they didn’t underprice Walmart’s. If they did, Energizer would discipline the sellers by raising their wholesale prices or limiting access to products.
The plaintiffs allege the scheme is evidenced by price increases between 2019 and 2023 that exceeded what a normally competitive market would see, as well as internal corporate correspondence and pricing records describing the pressure Energizer allegedly faced from Walmart to hike prices on smaller retailers.
The internal records and correspondence described in the legal filings seem to show that as early as January 2018, Energizer had allegedly developed an internal team, Project Atlas, to police customers who sold batteries below Walmart’s rate.
One of the plaintiffs, a discount battery reseller called Portable Power, employed pricing strategies that were considered “disruptive,” according to an Energizer manager. To “resolve” the issue in Walmart’s favor, Energizer raised wholesale prices for headlamps on Portable Power by 50 to 85 percent as early as November 2018, telling the California-based reseller the increase aligned with internal pricing policy.
This was the first of many Energizer moves to discipline Portable Power’s pricing, according to the reseller’s amended complaint. In the second quarter of 2019, Energizer again raised the wholesale prices of certain products—Max Alkaline and Ultimate Lithium batteries—by 8 percent for all its non-Walmart customers. The plaintiffs say this allowed Walmart to raise retail prices for the same Energizer products by an even greater margin—nearly 40 percent by the first quarter of 2020—while still maintaining price leadership.
In January 2021, an Energizer sales representative forwarded an email from the company’s Project Atlas team to Portable Power’s CEO, Richard Petretti, informing the battery reseller that it was “in violation” of Energizer’s “pricing policies.” Energizer then hiked the prices it charged Portable Power and, according to the amended complaint, “told Portable Power the minimum price it had to charge—Walmart’s price—to avoid being terminated as a distributor.”
Portable Power refused, and on February 1st, the Energizer sales representative warned Portable Power that it could no longer distribute certain Energizer products. When Portable Power’s CEO discussed the decision with the representative later that day by phone, the complaint alleges, the representative told him that “this is 1000% about Walmart and wanting the best price.”
Energizer has filed counterclaims in the same lawsuit against Portable Power, accusing the company of illegally obtaining “trade secrets” from Energizer employees to bring and support the litigation.
The two cases, PepsiCo and Energizer, show that Walmart’s business is “based on exercising market power over suppliers,” says Ron Knox, a senior researcher and policy advocate at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Indeed, other signs have emerged. As far back as 2017, Walmart reportedly demanded that prices from large consumer-goods companies selling through the retailer be 15 percent lower than competitors’ prices 80 percent of the time.
Whether Walmart illegally pushed suppliers to raise prices on its rivals has not been adjudicated. The PepsiCo case is dismissed. On September 28, the Northern District of California dealt a temporary setback to the plaintiffs in the Energizer-Walmart cases by denying their motion for class certification, meaning they did not establish antitrust injury on a class-wide basis. In layman’s terms, the court found the economics expert’s report the plaintiffs relied on unpersuasive, but the plaintiffs can try again.
Regardless of any final adjudication, the evidence surfaced in these cases should inform how policymakers address affordability concerns regarding the mega retailer or other behemoths. If Walmart is using its market power to inflate prices, lawmakers and regulators have tools to address that conduct. The Robinson-Patman Act is one route, particularly if Congress amends it to make it easier to include a dominant buyer like Walmart as a defendant alongside the seller.
By dropping the PepsiCo suit, the Trump administration denied itself the political benefits of challenging the nation’s largest retailer–something it might have touted in the recent midterm elections, when voters were outraged at high prices and the administration. A future White House, Democratic or Republican, should not make the same choice.
